TQM: global view - the big test

Across the world, education
reform is now seen as indispensable to economic success.Fine; but remember the children.BY
MICHAEL ELLIOTT

It has become the closest
thing to a global conventional wisdom: a nation's economic prosperity is
intimately tied to its stock of human capital, and its human capital depends
on the quality of its educational system. And so, in rich countries and
poor, from suburbs of the United States to crowded Asian cities to jungle
clearings in Latin America, schools have quietly become an extension of
economic policy. But as our stories on the following pages show, what this
means, in practice, varies widely across the globe.

In Asia, whose educational
achievements were, but yesterday, the stuff of envy in the Western world,
a reform movement is questioning first principles. Perhaps, Asian reformers
ask, the last two generations got things wrong - in stressing order, discipline
and a mastery of basic techniques, educationalists lost sight of the need
to develop habits that enable people to think outside the box, to be "creative".
In the United States, by contrast, the movement is all the other way. There,
educational reform questions whether the hurly-burly of American schools
adequately equips children for the challenges of adult life. And so - unnoticed
in most of the rest of the world - a great change is sweeping across America,
with the systematic testing of children's knowledge now dominating the
school year.

All of this is fine, in its
way. Yet to reduce schools to elements of economic policy is not without
risks. For explicitly, such a view places children at the front line of
social change, heaping demands and expectations on those who may not be
mature enough to deal with them. Last week, the British newspapers reported
the suicide of a 16-year-old gifted student who threw herself off a multistory
car park when she had a writer's block on the first day of her examinations.
"Perhaps," The Times of London reported her headmaster saying, "schools
generally and parents need to give more thought to the problems such children
can face."

Wise words: and ones that
apply not just to schools and parents. The international media have tended
to think of globalization as mainly a function of commerce and culture.
But increasingly, nations and peoples are trading their experiences in
other areas - health care, providing for the elderly and now education.
At Newsweek International, we are convinced that this expanded definition
of globalization will become more and more important. The following stories
on school testing are a sign of our commitment to that belief.